Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @12:14PM
from the wait-for-pneumatic-spam dept.

blee37 writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon demonstrate 'popping out' touch screen buttons to become physical buttons using pneumatics. The idea is to combine the dynamic reconfigurability of touch screen buttons with the tactile feedback of real buttons. The technology could be applied where tactile feedback is currently lacking, such as in car navigation systems, ATMs, or cell phones."

Quote [me.com]:"PhotoelasticTouch is a tabletop system designed to facilitate touch-based interaction with real objects made from transparent elastic material. The elastic material provides a realistic haptic interface, which when combined with the visual content displayed on the LCD tabletop, enables a coupling of the physical world and digital content. The system utilizes the photoelastic properties of transparent rubber to detect when a user pushes, pulls, or pinches the object, while the LCD provides appropriate visual feedback in accordance with the stress applied to the rubber."

Actually, several of these nav systems have mode to get directions when walking about. So I don't see why it would be a bad idea to make this more accessible for blind people. Providing a touchable map of the area could prove quite useful. Also, raised buttons would let them know where to press.

I'm pretty sure the guy in front of me on the 520 bridge this morning was blind or of limited vision. He had his head up his ass and he sure as hell couldn't drive. Perhaps a tactile feed back GPS would help him - it wouldn't hurt.

Personally, I like having tactile feedback when i press buttons - and the lack of it has kept me away from a pure touchscreen device. I bought a HTC Dream instead of an iPhone for this reason (and the fact I'm not a massive Apple fanboy)

HTC Hero (pureish touchscreen) has tactile feedback when you press a button in the form of vibration, I find this very nice, gives me a clue about the phone registering my press and I can go on to the next one - it does however, not, help me find the button I want without looking.

I get that- I wouldn't want to type all day on a touch keyboard, for example- but I find audio clues, like a click, to be almost as good with a display you only need to deal with on occasion. It's a tradeoff.

The tactile feedback is in you actually feeling the touch. You don't press, you touch. You don't need confirmation that you have touched hard enough. With buttons, you need feedback because you have to press them hard enough for the button press to register. So the feedback lets you know that you have pressed hard enough.

Tactile feedback isn't just about registering the press, it's also about registering when you're on the right button. With physical buttons, you can move your finger over them without pressing and find the right button without looking. You can do the same on a pressure-sensitive touchscreen that can produce raised or textured buttons. You can not with the iPhone.

And are very noisy. Imagine having the a Dustbuster's vacuum pump behind your dashboard, attached to a hundred yards of very thin hose.

I recall Tim Hunkin once building something like this with a rubber membrane covering a pattern of holes, and when you turned the vacuum on the membrane over the holes would depress making little ghost paw-prints in the rubber. It was noisy as hell.

When someone says that a piece of electronics has "moving parts" it is used to mean things like mechanical parts that move. This air pocket is not a mechanical piece that moves and hence doesn't fall under the traditional meaning of the word.

Your definition is an odd one.

If it isn't static, it is moving. If it is moving, it is generating stresses. Those stresses *might* be negligible, they *might* be significant. One thing is certain: In almost every situation, introducing into a system any additional co

Another thing that's nice about touchscreens is that the relative sizes of various buttons can change on the fly. The iPhone virtual keyboard dynamically resizes the area of different letters depending on what letter proceeded it. For example, if you just typed the letter 'c', the next letter you want is much more likely to be 'a' than 'z', so the 'a' button area becomes larger and the 'z' gets smaller. It doesn't change the visual size of the button on screen, because that would undoubtedly be quite annoyi

Just make buttons that have a touch screen on them, thus you still have the scroll-ability and versatility of a touch screen, combined with the tacticle feedback of buttons when you want things to function like a button...

missing the point. the object here is to have balloons in your phone that can fill up and deflate. this way when you let your baby girl play with your phone, she scratches at the 'button' until it pops.

The assembly of something with 15 buttons using the linked idea would probably be quite a lot cheaper than the assembly of 15 separate buttons, and the electronics to drive it would probably be simpler.

The idea is to make it possible to *change* the layout! Unless you have single-pixel buttons that are electronically raisable, you can’t do that with buttons.

Imagine a big red button that says *NUKE* and a load of info displays and buttons on a surface that lies in the location of your keyboard, when playing your mech game. (Mechwarrior was famous for needing a mouse, a joystick *and* a keyboard to properly play it. And I *loved* it for the ability to look, move and shoot in 3 different directions!:D

The idea is to make it possible to *change* the layout! Unless you have single-pixel buttons that are electronically raisable, you can’t do that with buttons.

Well, that's probably what it'll need to become before it's really practical. With the fixed mask in this demo product, it means that you're limited to one or two configurations (maybe a raised virtual keyboard, sunken phone dial pad). Which is a nice start, but it doesn't really add much compared to a physical keyboard. I'd think that with sufficient miniaturization, you could get it down to a per-pixel level (or close enough to be as useful, maybe 2x2 or 3x3 px), at which point you're maintaining the adva

Just make buttons that have a touch screen on them, thus you still have the scroll-ability and versatility of a touch screen, combined with the tacticle feedback of buttons when you want things to function like a button...

Heck, we had something like this when I was in the Navy. Buttons that actually contained something like a miniature slide projector* that could display multiple messages. I know these were first used in the 88/0 system which was first deployed in the late 60's, and they may even be older

Ever use a Blackberry Storm 9500/9530? It's a touch screen/giant button. There's one button behind the screen and you have to click it down to register a button press. It works ok, but apparently the Storm 2 (9520/9550) is much better in that regard. There are apparently 4 screen buttons, one in each corner and it allows multiple simultaneous button presses, making it much easier to type. The first iteration only allows one at a time. You can do multitouch for things like selecting text, and there used to b

I assumed I'd have issue with the touch keyboard on the iPhone. However, when I press a key, that key is highlighted and enlarges. I receive visual feedback of the key I pressed, even if I don't have physical feedback. Yes, it requires I look when I text, but I can't imagine many scenarios where I'd really ever text without looking just because there was some physical feedback.

I'll take the lack of moving parts over the physical feedback, especially given how often I've dropped my phone.

Hmm.. I still have issues with the touch keyboard, even after a year+. Especially annoying is typing in portrait mode, followed closely by top-row typing where I accidentally move the cursor (touch the text display area) instead of hitting the key I intended, followed next by inadvertent Space or Enter keypresses. Hitting the wrong key is something that happens even on a full-size keyboard, but it's pretty rare that I inadvertently do any of the above. If the iPhone had a model with a slide-out keyboard,

My Pre has an awesome slideout keyboard AND all the gestures and virtual keyboard of the iPhone (if you even wanted to bother with that), and a lot more. You'd be surprised at the difference between emails that I send with my Pre, vs. emails that my coworkers have sent with their iPhones. What it really comes down to is that you're using your phone as a computer while multitasking, and getting something written down quickly equates to getting complete thoughts out. This means that you don't get coworkers

Yeah, my boss has a Pre and I have an iPhone. His selection was made based on the features you mention. Mine was made based on the larger application base, the existing SDK, and the large market for apps, should I ever get off my lazy ass and write one.

I can't imagine many scenarios where I'd really ever text without looking just because there was some physical feedback.

Imagine there are other uses for touchscreens besides text messages. Like remote controls, in which you look to the television for visual feedback and the last thing you need is to have to look at the remote too...

Establish a grid of button surfaces, kind of like pixels, which can be dynamically re-grouped to merge them into larger buttons, and then put the display on that.

So, imagine you had a keyboard with essentially no gaps between the keys, and a screen on top of them. You could make one button out of qwe, one button out of tgyh, etc., while displaying your graphics seamlessly.

Or you could just do what ATMs have already been doing for ages, which is have blank buttons beside the screen and add the labels. But

That could take up a lot more space, especially when it's a full keyboard being displayed. Not ideal for mobile devices.

Well, right. Then again, typing is not ideal for mobile devices. Sure, you can jerry-rig solutions, but none of them work terribly well. (At least, neither Blackberries nor iPhones seem to have the problem well-solved). Probably the best answer for full-size keyboard stuff for mobile devices is some kind of neutral-hand-position bimanual chording keyboard, but that's expensive and intimidating, and requires a lot of learning on the user's part.

And what would be the actual pricetag of such a device? I understand that we use more and more electronics to simplify the mechanics behind our devices. Now, with a pump, you need to physically inject air under the screen, so you have moving parts, and they are usually costly... besides, what would be the reliability of such a thing? and could you get a "flat" screen?

And what would be the actual pricetag of such a device? I understand that we use more and more electronics to simplify the mechanics behind our devices. Now, with a pump, you need to physically inject air under the screen, so you have moving parts, and they are usually costly... besides, what would be the reliability of such a thing? and could you get a "flat" screen?

I am left thinking "so what?". All they did was PROJECT graphics onto an inflatable surface, and used a camera and image recognition to determine which 'button' was being pressed.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe this as a 'touch screen'; the image is projected onto the surface (which could be true for ANY surface) and the surface itself does NOT detect touches. There is also no tactile feedback whatsoever. I might as well get one of those laser projection keyboards, set it up on the bonnet of my car and announce that I've made a "self-propelling air-conditioned touchscreen that seats four".

An unavoidable limitation is that the mask itself is static, meaning that new shapes cannot be created dynamically. The technology only allows controlling whether the shapes pop in, pop out, or remain flat.

That makes it useless for all but a few uncommon use cases. But it may be the beginning of something, maybe another team will come up on a way to create a programmable mask.

Actually, the "exploding work stations" comes from computers even more primitive than the real ones in the 1960s. Vacuum tubes consume large amounts of power (a filimant has to be heated, much like an incandescant light bulb), and if you have a physical short (like the first computer bug that was actually a moth that shorted out some wires) you often have a "POP!" and some smoke.

Immersion Corporation is a small technology company that is also providing haptic (touch) feedback for a variety of electronics, including touch screens. They have the technology to make a flat button on a touch screen feel like it is a 3-dimensional button being depressed and it isn't confined to a single configuration. Lg, Samsung, and Nokia already license Immersion's technology and mobile phones with touch feedback are already being sold in Asia. In my opinion, this latex button is a good idea but it wo

instead of the cell phone filling the buttons with air, the owner of the phone should have to blow his cell phone up to use it. with a breathalyzer installed in the cell phone, the phone would be disabled from making calls, which would end the "i'm drunk so i'm calling my ex" phenomenon.

I feel like there is some sort of pertinent pizza-based analogy here... something about how when the crust has larger bubbles, it's a more rich and textural experience... I'm not sure though, as pizza-based analogies aren't really my expertise...

i cant stand the touchscreen interface...its a relic that persists because we are too lazy or stupid to grasp abstract concepts presented to us in the start of the 21st century. We still want to shake, poke, bump, and twist our interfaces to make them do what we want. Its just one more way to dumb-down information and technology as opposed to addressing the real issue: education.

Okay, maybe not octopus skin -- but in it, we have an existence proof for a surface that can display high-bandwidth color changes and slower, but quite elaborate, texture changes. With all the progress being made with microfluidics and chip-scale effectors, why on Earth would anyone pursue a chugging, hissing, thermodynamically-disadvantaged pneumatic system for this?

Thermodynamically disadvantaged? Huh? We're talking about what, 1-2 psi to inflate the buttons? At that pressure rise, the adiabatic temp increase is small (order of 10 degrees C). The majority of the work being done goes into P*V, just like it would if you replaced the air with a liquid.

I would assume that either way, the hard part is the micro-pump that can deliver useful pressures. Or maybe that's not that hard after all; I don't really follow the field.

...and discarded it because the screen itself is not flexible enough for serious dynamics (e.g. the form that your keyboard keys have), or if you use a second surface above it that you fill with the air, you get optical distortions.

My current concept is much cooler: Put pins in every spot between 4 pixels (on the corners), and use small magnetic actuators (like speakers) behind the screen, to drive the pins up and down. then attach a flexible foil on the top of the pins. now you can create very nice, fast a

I was really hoping this was going to be a fully programmable system that would allow a programmer to dynamically elevate arbitrary parts of the screen, but it seems to be completely static, so I don't really see the point. Ultimately, what I think people would want for devices like an iPhone would be to have fully dynamic "buttons" that are programmed using the windowing/widget API so that you maintain the application-specific dynamic UI that makes devices like the iPhone awesome while adding the tactile

What if instead of implanting these kinds of tactile feedback mechanisms in every single device I touch, I were to get programmable implants under the skin of each fingertip? That way the implant could respond to signals being sent from external devices and generate sensations to "fool" my nerves into perceiving depth or some other kind of feedback. If the implants had sufficient resolution, you could even encode other kinds of information in the feedback like the outlines of letters of other symbols. Could